THE
FAX MACHINE
Alexander
Bain and the Fax machine
The
telephone was invented in the 1870’s
by a Scotsman.
The fax machine was invented by another
Scotsman in the........
Yes! in the 1840's
long before the telephone...
A
Scotsman living in America invented
the telephone in 1875, and the instrument
has utterly changed our lives. The fax
machine brought about substantial change
when it came into general use in the
1970s. I was astonished to discover
that the fax machine was actually patented
thirty years before the telephone was
invented, by an ingenious shepherd from
the north of Scotland called Alexander
Bain
Alexander Bain and his twin sister Margaret
were born in October 1810. Their father
was a crofter, and Alexander had six
sisters and six brothers. They grew
up in a remote stone cottage at Leanmore,
a few miles north of Wick. The vast
expanse of peaty countryside has only
occasional scattered cottages, and the
Bain house, close to a small wood, became
a sheep byre, and is now little more
than an outline of low stonewalls. In
the winter Alexander walked a mile or
two to school in Backlass; in the summer
he worked as a shepherd.
He was bottom of his class in school,
and was a poor shepherd too, because
he was always dreaming. But he was fascinated
by clocks, and actually made himself
a model clock using heather for the
spring and the cogwheels, so his sympathetic
father got him apprenticed to a clockmaker
in Wick.
In January 1830 he walked 21 miles through
the snow from Wick to Thurso to hear
a lecture on 'Light, heat, and the electric
fluid'. The lecture changed his life,
for he decided immediately that electricity
was the stuff to work with. He began
inventing electrical devices, including
various types of automatic telegraph,
an electric clock, an earth battery,
insulation for electric cables and an
electric fire alarm. He took out patents
on all these, and also on inkstands,
ink holders and a ship's log. The most
amazing idea he had was for what he
called the electro-chemical telegraph,
which we would call a fax machine. However,
before he had a chance to develop it,
he ran into an unpleasant spot of trouble
in London.
In 1840 Bain was desperate for money
to develop his clocks and his fax machine;
he talked about his financial problems
to the editor of the Mechanics Magazine,
who introduced him to the well-known
and highly respected Professor Sir Charles
Wheatstone. Bain took his models to
demonstrate at Wheatstone's house.
Wheatstone watched Bain's gadgets with
fascination, and, when asked for his
opinion, said 'Oh, I shouldn't bother
to develop these things any further!
There's no future in them.' Bain
went away disconsolate, but three
months later Wheatstone went to the
Royal Society and before the leaders
of the scientific establishment demonstrated
an electric clock, claiming it was his
own invention. Luckily, Bain had already
applied for his patent.
Professor Sir Charles Wheatstone had
all the advantages of rank and social
position, and did his level best to
block Bain's patents. He failed, and
rumors of his skullduggery began to
circulate. So when Wheatstone organised
an Act of Parliament to set up the Electric
Telegraph Company, the House of Lords
summoned Bain to give evidence, and
eventually compelled the company to
pay Bain £10,000 and give him a job
as manager. Wheatstone resigned in a
huff.
In 1841 Alexander Bain made a new kind
of electric telegraph, the first of
three devices he dreamed up to send
pictures or printed words along telegraph
wires. This was an idea decades ahead
of its time: in those days messages
were sent by Morse code - people had
to wait thirty years for the telephone
- so even a skilled operator could send
only a few words a minute. Bain's machine
was to change all that. Bain had already
worked out how to set up a system of
clocks that would remain exactly synchronised.
He put a master clock in the railway
station in Edinburgh, and another clock
in the railway station in Glasgow. Then
he arranged that every time the Edinburgh
pendulum swung it sent a pulse of electricity
along the telegraph wires, which drove
a solenoid in Glasgow and pushed the
Glasgow pendulum at exactly the same
time. Bain's electrical mechanism didn't
just make the clocks run at the
same rate, it forced the pendulums to
stay precisely in step.
When he wanted to send a picture along
the wires, he made a copy of it in copper,
and etched away everything but the lines
he wanted. Then he arranged for a metal
needle or stylus to swing across the
picture. Each time it touched copper
it made contact and sent a pulse along
the telegraph wire.
The needle was attached to the pendulum
of the clock at each end, so the positions
of the contacts were faithfully reproduced
at the receiving end by a matching stylus
running across electro-sensitive paper;
whenever there was a blip of current
the stylus left a black mark on the
paper, corresponding to the position
of the line in the original picture.
Finally he arranged for both pictures
- the one being sent and the one being
received - to drop down by a millimetre
at every swing of the pendulum. Thus
the outgoing picture was gradually scanned
by the stylus swinging across it and
moving down line by line, and at the
receiving end the new copy picture was
gradually built up.
The whole concept was an outstanding
example of pushing the available technology
to its limits. Unfortunately, Bain,
despite his ingenuity, was hopeless
with money. He wasted lots in litigation
in America, and lots more on trying
to achieve perpetual motion. He eventually
died in Glasgow, poor and sad, in 1877.
Wheatstone is famous, Bain is
forgotten. But the man who invented
the fax machine, a vital feature of
every office today, was that unknown
shepherd from Caithness, Alexander Bain.
Reference
material: Local Heroes by Adam Hart
Davis & Paul Bader Sutton publishing
Ltd Phoenix Mill. Stroud. Gloucestershire
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